Finding Community
When I signed up for the poetry workshop I took this spring, one of my goals was to find some community here in Baltimore for myself as a writer, even if I didn’t enjoy the form. Well, as it turned out, I really loved the form, but also, I got to make some new friends and meet a widening circle of writers here in Baltimore, which has turned into opportunities unfolding one after the other.
This Saturday, I went to a workshop at The Writer’s Center, a place I had read about but never visited. A new writer-friend had signed up, and we rode to Bethesda together for a three-hour intensive workshop on submitting work for publication with Nancy Naomi Carlson, a widely published poet who gives workshops there regularly. If you are in the DC/VA/MD or even Pennsylvania area, I can’t recommend the experience too highly. I learned so much practical, useful information and came away with new ideas for how to do market research on different publications, how to think about my own aesthetic as a poet, and how to divine the aesthetic of a journal and whether it matches my own. I have new ideas on how to track submissions, acceptances, and rejections and feel a new surge of energy in regards to revision, and even rejection.
This week, I’ll be working on a poem for the new workshop at the BMA I’m taking, again with Christine Stewart and again in the ekphrastic form. I also bought myself some new books of poetry this weekend: a volume of collected Marilyn Hacker, who I saw read a few years ago and loved, and Against Love Poetry by Eavan Boland. I’m taking them both to the beach with me this week, along with one or two paperbacks, and am looking forward to have beautiful words in my head and sand between my toes.
I took a workshop there in like 1987. It was great.
Uh, that would be at The Writer’s Center…
And (note to self: read entire post before commenting) I LOVE Eavan Boland.
I didn’t know you were in this area in 1987! And yeah, I’m loving her more and more too.